Auguste Comte
Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte (19 January 1798 – 5 September 1857), better known as Auguste Comte, was a French philosopher. He was a founder of the discipline of sociology and of the doctrine of positivism. He is sometimes regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term. Tossup Questions # Georges Canguilhem devoted the first part of his The Normal and the Pathological to a critique of the conceptions of normality espoused by Claude Bernard and this thinker. John Stuart Mill wrote that one could distinguish between "good" and "bad" versions of this thinker, in response to a late work in which this thinker proposed a secular "Religion of Humanity." In an earlier work, this thinker classified what he thought of as the six fundamental sciences on an "encyclopedic scale." In that same work, this author of System of Positive Polity posited a succession of three stages in humanity's development: the theological, the metaphysical, and finally the positive. That work is the Course on Positive Philosophy, and this thinker coined the terms "altruism" and "sociology." For 10 points, name this founder of positivism, an early French sociologist. # This man argued that the sciences progressed from mathematics to a state where all social facts would reduce to laws, and Harriet Martineau translated many of his works into English. One of his works examines the "System of" a certain type of Polity and emphasizes morality as the central focus of human knowledge and effort. This man claimed that human thought moved through three stages beginning with the theological. He published a "Course" on a philosophical position which states that the only true knowledge is scientific knowledge. For 10 points, name this Frenchman who coined the term "sociology" and founded positivism. # With Henri de Saint-Simon, this man wrote essays like The Industry and The Organizer, and he died shortly after writing a philosophical examination of mathematics entitled The Subjective Synthesis. This man coined a word that describes one's unselfish concern for the well-being of others. He speculated that man goes through phases of animism, polytheism, and monotheism in the larger Theocratic Stage, a part of his Law of the Three Stages. He also invented a philosophy that states that the only true knowledge is sensory knowledge. Name this Frenchman who came up with Altruism and Positivism, sometimes considered the first sociologist. # Herbert Spencer wrote about some Reasons for Dissenting from the Philosophy of this man, who divided history into the military aim and the industrial aim in Plan of Scientific Studies Necessary for the Reorganization of Society. His collaboration with Saint-Simon influenced his belief that the progress of societies started with animism, polytheism, and monotheism. Those divisions make up the Theological stage, which was followed by the Metaphysical stage in his three-stage model of societal development, which culminated in a purely scientific stage. For 10 points, name this author of Course of Positive Philosophy, the founder of positivism and father of sociology. # His magnum opus was a "plan of scientific studies necessary for the reorganization of society," and he claimed that religions start with fetishism, progress to polytheism, and graduate to monotheism before abandoning religion altogether. He argued that humans progressed through a "theological," "metaphysical," and "scientific" stage in his "law of three stages." He claimed that humans should "live for others" and coined the word "altruism," and called his philosophy "positivism." For 10 points, name this Frenchman, the father of sociology.